A legacy of education
Danne Smith Mathis, a 1979 graduate of Dietrich College, began digging into that history in 1999, prompted by a conversation she had when she returned to campus for her 20th reunion. She began searching through yearbooks and other archives at Hunt Library, filling her weekends tracking down names, milestones and images of Black Tartans.
In 2001, those efforts became “Decades in Black: The 100-Year History of the Black Student at Carnegie Mellon University 1900-2000,” a short documentary that shares the history of the Black student experience at CMU.
While reviewing Carnegie’s papers for the documentary, Mathis made a striking discovery: One of his priorities in founding the Carnegie Technical Schools in 1900 was to provide an education for Black residents of Pittsburgh and beyond. Mathis says she believes that the Tuskegee Institute, a post-secondary school founded by Booker T. Washington in Alabama in 1881, may have served as a model for what became Carnegie Mellon.
When Danne Smith Mathis began researching the history of Black students at Carnegie Mellon, she found two things: Countless stories of achievement, even in the face of societal barriers, and Andrew Carnegie’s surprisingly expansive view of access to higher education.